The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (46 page)

Having shed his Army uniform and bulletproof Kevlar, wearing just a T-shirt and short pants—as if he were headed out to football practice on the Coral Gables High School practice field—Dave Roller left Observation Post Warheit with a few of his men to meet with a group of Kamdesh elders. It was mid-September, but the July 27 battle at Saret Koleh remained fresh in his mind, a scar that time would never fully heal.

The makeshift landing zone.
(Photo courtesy of Alex Newsom)

Desperate, angry, and tired of getting shot at, Roller was ready to give this counterinsurgency business a try. Bostick had been a fantastic commander, but his strength was really more in the kinetic side of things, in fighting, thought Roller. Hutto, in contrast, had spent years working in special operations on unconventional warfare in Latin America, and he regarded counterinsurgency outreach as being common sense. He’d been encouraging his 1st Platoon leader to extend a hand toward the residents of Kamdesh Village. So Roller and his guys took a couple of cases of water with them as a gift, and they all sat down in a circle with the local elders, and Roller, through an interpreter, told the Afghans that he wanted to learn more about them so he could better be of service.

The Kamdeshis didn’t understand at first. The Americans wanted to
help
them? Why would conquerors want to help those whose country they were occupying? Why would invaders reach out to them in such a way? It made no sense.

Roller tried to explain that he and his men all had families back in America. He pointed to Sergeant First Class Michael Burns and Staff Sergeant Zachary Crawford. “These men are fathers just like you,” he told the elders. “They’re husbands and fathers whose wives and children are scared for their lives. They have families that they’re responsible for providing for, but they’ve chosen to be here in Kamdesh to help you.” His own parents were terrified he’d be killed, he said, but he and his troops thought it was important to help the people of Nuristan. He was trying to get the Kamdesh elders to see him and his men as real people, with real emotions. Indeed, he was convinced that to the villagers, Americans—with their camouflage helmets, body armor, huge guns, and sunglasses masking their eyes, their bodies festooned with confusing technological devices—appeared robotic, nearly inhuman. That was why Roller had worn his gym clothes to this meeting, so he would look not like an Army officer or any other sort of authority figure but instead like just a young man—a kid, really—who was there to help them, almost as if he were with the Peace Corps.

Observation Post Warheit.
(Photo courtesy of Rick Victorino)

In August, during his first week at Camp Keating, Hutto had asked Kenny Johnson, in charge of contracting, to call a meeting with local vendors to discuss various development projects. Some of these projects were funded by the PRT, while others were financed through a special discretionary sum meted out by the commander—in this case, Hutto and Johnson. The distinction meant nothing to the locals who were competing for the money.

The next week, Hutto began making the rounds and holding shuras in local villages, starting with Urmul, followed by Kamdesh. In Urmul, residents made clear their disdain for Kamdesh District’s administrator, Anayatullah, who’d taken Gul Mohammed Khan’s place. Among the reasons for their antipathy was the fact that Anayatullah’s family had been chased out of the area years before; it seemed curious to them that the son of an ostracized family should have been appointed to such a position. The villagers also complained that he was corrupt and didn’t look out for their interests. Hutto told the Nuristanis that the United States wanted them to take control of everything—their own governance, development, and security—and suggested that if they did that, the Americans would show more deference to their autonomy and territorial sovereignty. But by the same token, they would also be responsible for any bad guys in their midst who fired upon Camp Keating or attacked the patrols that Hutto was sending out at such a frenetic pace. The villagers seemed receptive to these terms.

Over the next several months, Hutto and Kolenda began establishing close working relationships with elders in the area, and they urged their lieutenants to do the same—whence Roller’s excursion from Observation Post Warheit. At Kamdesh, Mawlawi Abdul Rahman had become a prominent elder. Rahman was fairly quiet and not really comfortable speaking in large forums. He wore the only pair of photochromic lenses—glasses that turned dark in the sun—that the Americans ever saw on a Nuristani. He was polite and so indirect that it was sometimes a task to figure out where he stood on an issue. The men of 1-91 Cav knew that Rahman had been a student of Mullah Sadiq’s—the HIG leader who went underground in 2006—but they liked him. Hutto, Kolenda, and their ANA counterparts hoped that Rahman might even persuade Sadiq to encourage HIG fighters’ partnering with the Afghan government and the ISAF forces.

Lieutenant Dave Roller meeting with Kamdesh elders.
(Photo courtesy of Dave Roller)

The Americans were firm, but they could be deferential, too, when they needed to be.

Marine Master Sergeant Scott Ingbretsen, in charge of training seventy-two ANA soldiers at Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Warheit, tried his best to convey the sense that he worked for the Afghans, that it was the ANA commander, Lieutenant Noorullah, who made the decisions for his company. Raised as an Air Force brat, Ingbretsen, now thirty-eight, had joined the Marines because they accepted his application before the Air Force did. He’d done three tours in Iraq, combating IEDs as an explosive-ordnance disposal technician—one of those guys who would be depicted in the 2008 film
The Hurt Locker,
which many in the field would deride for its unrealistic portrayal of such specialists as out-of-control rogues. Ingbretsen approached Nuristani politics and pride with the sensitivity of an expert trying to defuse a bomb. When he first met his ANA company, a platoon sergeant was giving a class on hand and arm signals. Afterward, the Afghan sergeant asked him what he’d thought of the class, adding, “I’m sure you’re going to change the signals.” Ingbretsen reasoned that he’d been preceded as a trainer for that ANA company by any number of other individuals from any number of other countries, most, if not all, of whom had forced the troops to learn their particular motions.

“It probably makes more sense for
me
to learn
your
hand signals,” Ingbretsen replied. “There are more of you than there are of me.” That went over well. Bomb defused.

Many of the men in Ingbretsen’s company had been fighting since they were young teenagers, either as mujahideen or on the other side, as allies of the Soviets. So he figured his job was to professionalize the new Afghan troops—to make sure they understood the importance of representing the Afghan government in ethical and respectful ways. Some of their previous experiences had encouraged habits that were difficult to break. For example, many Afghans had seen that Soviet enlisted men were neither trusted nor respected by their officers, so, following that model, their own enlisted men were considered pretty much personae non gratae. When the usual conflicting tribal, ethnic, and village loyalties were added to the mix, ANA officers and their sergeants hardly stood as paragons of harmony and discipline.

On their first major patrol after their arrival in the area in September 2007, Ingbretsen and his ANA troops visited a couple of small villages, including Upper Kamdesh, where Lieutenant Noorullah sat down with Mohammed Gul, the
malik,
or conduit between the village and the Afghan government. Gul was angry—
very
angry. He told Noorullah how the Americans had, the previous year, bombed a local village; children had died, he said. Noorullah didn’t know how to respond. He looked at Ingbretsen, who asked him for permission to speak. It was granted.

Ingbretsen was contrite. “We come from a good country,” he said humbly. “The United States wants to do good things for your people. But mistakes happen. All I can do is apologize.”

The
malik
looked at the American. “Don’t be sad,” he said. “It’s okay.” He invited Ingbretsen and Noorullah to dine with him that night.

Similarly, on another occasion, former district administrator Gul Mohammed Khan invited Hutto to his home in Upper Kamdesh for dinner. It was an impressive spread, as these things went, but Mohammed didn’t hold back, laying into Hutto about civilian casualties, night raids, and house-to-house searches. Special Forces teams and other Americans had been coming into Nuristan for years, and it seemed to the Kamdesh elders that all they knew was brute force.

Hutto looked at Mohammed. “I’m sorry that those things happened to you,” he said. “I can’t change the past. But what we can do is work together on how we interact with one another to support the needs of the people.” Such apologies could—and that night, did—completely change a meeting’s dynamics. In a culture in which pride and respect were paramount, deference and remorse could go a long way.

On September 6, Hutto and Johnson hosted a shura at Camp Keating. In attendance were district administrator Anayatullah, Afghan National Police commander Abdul Jalil, local ANA commander Lieutenant Noorullah, and a large group of elders from nearby villages and settlements. Anayatullah began the meeting by reading from the Quran and making a passionate plea for cooperation. Security was a big problem, he said. The members of the Eastern Nuristan Security Shura were supposed to have established a security plan, but they hadn’t gotten it done. Everyone knew that insurgents lived in the villages; some of the fighters were even related to members of the gathered shura. Indeed, Anayatullah noted, the primary mullah of Kamdesh had a son who was an insurgent.

Anayatullah then asked the elders, “Before the Americans came to Kamdesh, had you ever heard of a development project?” Of course not, he said. The insurgents were making no effort to build a stronger Afghanistan, whereas the United States was trying to help. “So,” he announced, “we need to help the Americans.” Two days before, insurgents had fired a PKM machine gun into the Camp Keating mosque, which was used primarily by the ANA soldiers and the outpost’s Afghan Security Guards. Firing into a mosque? “These are not Muslims,” Anayatullah declared, “they are terrorists. If you help the bad guys, we will destroy you. If the local people help the enemy fighters, they are not helping the government; they are considered to be Al Qaeda.” Others weighed in, expressing similar sentiments.

Meetings proceeded in this same manner over the next couple of months. Sometimes they took place at Combat Outpost Keating, but it was preferable to hold them in the villages, because “forcing” the Americans to travel to them enhanced the elders’ credibility in the eyes of their people. Kolenda and Hutto noticed, in fact, that there seemed to be a direct correlation between their participation in these shuras and a decline in violence. By the end of September, attacks on Camp Keating and OP Warheit, as well as on Bulldog Troop patrols and missions, had ceased.